


Protect Me From What I Want

by Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl



Series: Companion Stories - Luthors and Kryptonians [6]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Episode: s03e06 Midvale, Gen, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 08:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17484863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl/pseuds/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl
Summary: Kara wants her family. Clark wants to be human.





	Protect Me From What I Want

Normal means something different to Kara. 

Normal is a red sun. Feud with Daxamites. 

Normal is interplanetary politics and travel. 

Normal is millions of miles away from Midvale.

But there is a new normal for Kara. Kara Zor-El, who is 13 and left in Midvale, because Kal-El is all grown up, and rather than needing her, didn’t know what to do except to leave her with a family who knew his secrets and could care for her better than he could, he claims. Kara hates it, but she understands. She knows when she is unwanted.

She is less understanding when they make her hide everything about herself when Clark gets to flaunt it. She understands the secrecy - but she isn’t allowed even that. Clark gets to be Superman. Kara gets to be the weird new girl, at a new school, where everything is weird and awful and decidedly not normal. The yellow sun is odd on her skin, prickling uncomfortably, too heavy, too hot. The lead glasses discomforting to adjust to. Her pseudo-sister hates her existence. The very air of the planet feels dense and heavy in her lungs, settling poorly. She feels as if she’s drowning; it's only partially a metaphorical feeling.

Normal would mean normal strength, not feeling lost in her own skin. Her stength is off, gravity is different. She feels too light and too heavy all at once. Her eyes see through things, burn things when she’s angry. She cannot kick and scream and cry the way she wants to, because on this planet, she may just tear the house down, cause an earthquake. She doesn’t want to be careful, to be human-normal. She wants to go home, but her home doesn’t exist anymore.

But Kara trudges through, until Kenny is killed.

Then...well. If Clark could fight the meteor mutants of Smallville in his pre-Superman days back in high school, then she can solve her only friend’s murder. They call Chloe, who wisely doesn’t ask many questions. She was too used to Clark’s weirdness, and she grew up with the Smallville mutants after all. A normal human murder isn’t anything wild anymore.

The catch Kenny’s killer, and it isn’t an alien, it isn’t a meteor mutant. There isn’t any kryptonite, no mysticism, nothing to do with Kara at all really. Just small town America’s humanity at its worst. Kal-el grew up in Smallville, all-American farm boy they call him. The peak of human-normalcy. He has rose-colored glasses when he looks at the humans. All Kara can see is the ways they fail at measuring up. He feels human playing alien, Kara feels Krypton playing human. Clark calls himself an alien, Kara still sees the humans as the aliens. Therein lies the difference. 

Kara and Alex start getting along better. They become friends, rather than antagonists forced to share the same room, the same air, the same planet. Alex still gets jealous and angry, and Kara still doesn’t think of herself as a Danvers, but it's a start.

Then Superman arrests Lex Luthor, and Kara doesn’t understand. Because she alternates between idolizing the hero Kal-El has become, and hating him for choosing heroics over her. Because she has met Lex Luthor - once Kal-El’s best friend - and agrees with everything he has said about the next alien not being as friendly as Superman is. She worries some nights it might be her, if she cannot learn to love the humans and the Earth the way her cousin has. She has seen what's out there, knows better than Lex or Kal-El can imagine what destruction can be wrought upon Earth. Some nights, she thinks it might just be her that does so. Kal-El it seems, has a habit of betrayal - but no one could be as golden as they seemed. Everyone has a darkness - he just hasn’t admitted his. That just might make him all the more dangerous - he doesn’t realize just how much damage he can do.

Kara mets Lex because Clark is friends, of sorts, with him. Because they are friends and enemies; something more and less than either of those things. She meets him when she crashes into Earth, and they are both pretending they don’t know the other knows that Lex knows Clark is really Superman. 

They both want to protect humanity from threats - Lex wants to protect humanity from itself and from alien threats those not as kind as Superman. Clark just wants to do good and be allowed to do good, and wants people to not interfere. He thinks he can shoulder the weight of humanity's faults, they both do.

Kara thinks Lex makes some good points. And she thinks they both tread a too narrow line - one or the other was bound to fall, especially given their entire sordid history.

Kara visits Lex - she hasn’t seen him since back when she landed on earth. Back when Clark and Lex we’re still friends, while Superman and Luther were enemies. Kara thinks the DoubleThink broke their brains after a while. Playing a game of I know-you know-that I know-but we’re both pretending you don't know-I know what I know.

She visits Lex, because Clark is Earth’s resident heroic alien but he doesn’t quite know what’s out there the way Kara does and Lex suspects. He’s an optimist, and Kara has watched her planet burn and cannot help but think differently. Clark loves Smallville. But Kara finds Midvale suffocatingly small. They are not all that similar when it comes down to it, Kara and Clark. Because Clark has lived life believing he was human, goes through life as a human coming into a alien powers. It is the Kryptonian parts which comes hesitantly to him. Kara is still learning how to fake humanity. To keep her feet on the ground, while her thoughts still run in her native tongue. Kal-El does not remember living under a red sun, but Kara bears the weight of the yellow sun of Earth with difficulty. Like the weight of her entire world, the last true child of Krypton.

So Kara visits Lex, because Clark isn’t going to unless he’s dragged there. Lois may actually do that - Kara thinks Lois has more awareness of Lex and Clark’s feelings than either of them do. But Smallville, Kansas is a whole universe away from what Kara well and truly understands. She barely understands human courtships, but she knows enough to know fighting nearly to death is not romantic on this planet, not for humans at least.

Lex has his cell. Isolated from other prisoners, though lush, because the Luthor fortune cannot buy freedom but it can buy luxury.

“Smallville junior” he greets when he sees her.

“He sent me to Midvale actually” she replies .

She wonders if he can see the rage coiled in her frame, small and skinny as she is, looking younger than her age, even if you aren’t counting the years in the Phantom Zone. Her heels don’t lay flat to the floor, and she is wearing lead-lined glasses for a reason. She doesn’t touch walls, or anything really, if she can help it. 

She doesn’t know what to say after. There really isn’t anything to say. Because Clark put Lex here. Because Kara might just of have the straw that broke the camel’s back of Lex’s sanity. Because the last time they say each other Kara raged and cried that Clark was sending her away, and this supposed villain was the one that held her and got her to her new home safely.

He wears a pendant of kryptonite around his neck - one Kara knows came from a girl named Lana Lang, what might as well have been a million years ago for how far past it all seems. There is history there she knows, that it comes from a girl Clark once loved, that Lex protected him from. That there is precisely one thing Lana Lang, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor have in common that Kara knows of, without ever having met the first two. One day, Cat Grant will tell her about how she used to work for the Daily Planet, and how she and Lois Lane are something like frenemies, and how Clark Kent as a “goddamn double L alliteration fetish”. But here and now, Kara hasn’t met Cat Grant, so that thought doesn’t occur to her. Here and now, she only knows the barest bones of the story, and that Lana Lang was the beginning of the end for Clark and Lex, and the lies that tore them apart.

She doesn’t know why she came here. Only that it’s finally cemented how much no one wants her to be like Clark. She can’t be a hero like him. She can’t even do the things he did in high school to help people. She’s so frustrated she wants to scream or destroy something just to show them she isn’t as helpless as they seem to think. She’s homesick more than anything, and frustrated that they treat her so young and ignorant. Kara thinks this is probably how Lex felt every time Clark lied. She doesn’t know what to say though. So she just sits. 

Until Lex asks “Why are you even here?”

He seems tired. Bravado bleeding out of him until he is just Lex - a human. Kara doesn’t really know why. 

“Why” was a combination of factors that she couldn’t succinctly place into english words. 

“Why” was that he was Clark’s friend once upon a Time, a close friend. 

“Why” was Midvale was suffocating even now that she and Alex where getting along.

“Why” was that she hadn’t seen Clark since he left her there. 

“Why” boiled down to the fact that normal felt like prison. And she didn’t quite think he was evil - at least his intentions weren’t, though his methods left much to be desired. 

Finally she said “You helped me when he sent me away.” She figured it was fair to talk to him, one of four humans who knew who she was.

Lex snorts a laugh, “Fair enough.”

There is more silence before she asks “Do you ever just hate humans?”

And Lex shakes his head and goes “all the time.”

And after a pause “You really aren’t any thing like Clark. You’ve both got the whole sunny positivity thing but…” He trails off.

“Clark” Kara says “Is painfully human”.

She says his name like its sour and heavy in her mouth, foreign and wrong on her tongue.

“Clark” is all the best parts of humanity the Martha and Jonathan Kent could install. They both know this, and Kara hates him for it.

And Lex voices the unspoken second half of her thought, “but he’s a terrible Kryptonian.”

And Kara nods. It isn’t that she isn’t proud of her cousin, its that she feels lost. It was her job to raise him, to show in the Kryptonian way, train him, teach him their language, their culture. Ensure that Krypton had a last son as well as a last daughter. And she feels she has failed. He has embraced humanity too much to ever see himself as Kryptonian first, to listen to her truly, rather than simply humoring her. She is the last one who will worship Rao, the last native speaker of her tongue, the last to remember the splendor of Krypton in its prime. 

She feels betrayed by the humans who took him from her, that changed his name, took his loyalty from her and their people. Betrayed that he would choose his accidental life over his last remaining blood in the universe. That he cannot understand why she simply cannot embrace Earth as home as readily as he did. That he cannot understand why she does not wish to be coddled and treated like a child, because that was never the plan. No one asks what she wants or needs, they just tell her where she will go, live, how she will act and exist. Human social structures are very different from Kryptonian ones, and it is nearly as stifling as the foreign air in his lungs. He did not trust her enough to keep her with him, or even to send her to his own childhood home. He sent her off with what were little more than strangers, even to him, because she would be too much trouble for his found family. It speaks volumes to how much he embraces her, accepts her.

She feels that if he will not love her as blood, she has no reason to search for it in his beloved humans. 

He wants to push her off, forget about her and Krypton. Enjoy the ability the yellow sun gives him, and see himself as a hero of humanity, seperate from his lost culture, lost people. Wants to forget he is not human, wants to cling to his identity. Which supposes she can sympathize, because that's all she wants to.

  
  



End file.
